The ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility product consists of ServiceNow® Discovery, ServiceNow® Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, Service Graph Connectors, CMDB 360, and Firewall Audits and Reporting. Discovery and Service Mapping give you a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services that it supports.

Who uses ITOM Visibility

ITOM Visibility enables the IT departments of enterprises and cloud companies providing platform as a service to discover their IT resources.

ServiceNow® Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is not just an operational tool, it is a strategic necessity in today’s IT landscape. Maintaining an accurate and complete CMDB provides the foundation for maintaining critical services and drives multiple outcomes important to IT departments.

ITOM Visibility discovers many things which are stored in the CMDB.

Data collected by ITOM Visibility provides a foundation for operation of the following business units and products of ServiceNow AI Platform:
ITOM Health
Use ITOM Health to track and maintain the health of services in your organization. ITOM Health gathers alerts from infrastructure events captured by third-party monitoring tools. It then uses IT-related information gathered by Discovery to map alerts to configuration items. Based on the collected information, ITOM Health provides dashboards showing a consolidated view of all service-impact events. You can also use ITOM Health to proactively analyze your IT infrastructure to spot issues and prevent service outages. Using advanced machine learning to analyze information about your IT infrastructure, the application automatically determines dynamic thresholds and identifies anomalies that may indicate potential service outages.
ITOM Optimization
ITOM Optimization gives you tools to provision private and public cloud infrastructure and services and to achieve consistent management and cost visibility. The Cloud Insights application, available in the ServiceNow Store, helps you to analyze the full range of costs associated with cloud assets so you can identify and take action on opportunities to save money and optimize operations.
Software Asset Management
Understand the software running in your IT environment. Software Asset Management works together with the CMDB powered up by ITOM Visibility. Use Software Asset Management to track configurations that impact software license consumption across your IT environments and datacenter.
Customer Service Management
Efficiently diagnose and resolve issues related to the IT infrastructure by using near real-time data supplied by ITOM Visibility.
IT Service Management
Rely on the IT infrastructure discovered by ITOM Visibility to manage and deliver services to your users. See changes and incidents created and managed by IT Service Management applications in ITOM Visibility service maps.
Strategic Portfolio Management
Use data collected by ITOM Visibility to gain a comprehensive understanding of the applications used in your organization.
Security Operations
View security incidents in the context of ITOM Visibility to find out which application services are at risk. Use this information to prioritize and resolve threats based on the impact they pose to your organization.

How you use ITOM Visibility

The Discovery feature offers a replicable and reliable method of identifying the enterprise IT infrastructure. Discovery can find computers, servers, software, printers, routers, and switches. It can also find IP-enabled devices and applications that run on them, resources from various cloud providers, and TLS certificates. This method is referred to as horizontal discovery. Connections between the devices and applications are not included in horizontal discovery.

The Service Mapping feature maps dependencies, based on a connection between devices and applications. This method is referred to as top-down mapping. The top-down mapping helps you immediately see the impact of a problematic object on the rest of the application service operation. Application service maps show infrastructure objects and connections between them. Service Mapping regenerates application service maps regularly, to keep them updated and relevant. Any faulty objects are shown along with the devices and applications they affect, providing a visual clue of the state of the application service.

Figure 1. Comparison of horizontal discovery and top-down mapping results
Diagram showing results of horizontal discovery and top-down mapping results

How ITOM Visibility works

Discovery can use scripts to collect and process data on a host and then update the CMDB. Scripts that explore or investigate CIs on your network are called probes. Sensors are the scripts that parse the data returned from the probes. In addition, Discovery uses discovery patterns. A pattern is a sequence of operations whose purpose is to detect attributes of devices and applications and, when used by Service Mapping, their outbound connections.

Service Mapping can deploy different methods for creating application services. Discovery patterns are the main method used by Service Mapping. However, you can also map application services using tags, and traffic connections between devices and applications. For more information, see Choose the right method for mapping application services.

ITOM Visibility licensing

The ServiceNow AI Platform® uses a licensing method where your organization is billed for using ITOM Visibility applications. ITOM Visibility and Discovery are available as separate licenses. The ServiceNow Product Documentation doesn't provide information on prices, packaging, or other details determined by your organization customer contract. For general information about licensing and subscriptions, see ITOM/OT SU Licensing and subscriptions.

What to know before you begin

ITOM Visibility is available with activation of the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin and the Service Mapping (com.snc.service-mapping) plugin, which require an ITOM Visibility subscription. For details, see Request Discovery and Request Service Mapping. For full ITOM Visibility functionality, install the latest ITOM Visibility out-of-band applications from the ServiceNow Store. For cumulative release note information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

Define users and configure credentials to enable ITOM Visibility access to applications and devices inside your organization network. For details, see Prerequisites for performing top-down discovery using Service Mapping.